I need to lose weight. I weigh too much for my height or, maybe my weight is fine and I’m just too short. I don’t know. But, since I can’t change the latter, I need to drop some poundage. Or wear heels every day. Actually, I’m perfectly fine with my height. I’m 5′ 3 1/2″, not tall but, as a kid, I reached this height at a very young age. My ballet teacher would put us in height order and I stood head and shoulders above the next tallest student. On the first day of every grade school year, my teacher would put us in height order to seat us and, as the tallest girl in the class, I was always assigned a seat in the back. Since I wanted to be a model from about age 6, being tall was an asset and the minute I was old enough to wear heels, I never took them off. I was lanky with long arms and legs and everyone thought I was inches taller than I was. In fact, I never thought about my actual height until I started to commute to work every day after college and realized, very unhappily, that on a crowded subway train, I often stand face to armpit. Yeah. That sucked. Still does.

I know I’m not alone in my desire/need to lose weight – or even in my realization about my height. Besides conversations with friends, there are studies. Not that I need validation, but it is interesting to see how other people perceive themselves.

A new survey, conducted by ReportLinker on May 16, 2017 of 503 online respondents representative of the US population indicates that 42% consider themselves overweight. 77% of respondents say being in good shape and looking good is very important to them but only 37% report that they’re in good shape. How do Americans get into better shape? ReportLinker has an infographic for that too. See it below …

And, here’s another interesting finding from the survey: 75% of respondents say that they compare how they look to others. (I fall into the 25% camp on that one. I don’t compare, don’t care, but I was surprised to see that I am in the minority for that statistic.)

A picture is worth a thousand words so an infographic is worth, how much? I don’t know but ReportLinker compiled handy infographics to illustrate the results of their survey. They gave me permission to reprint them. Find them below. To see all of the results of this survey, visit the site here.)